Dahr Jamail, who exposed how the U.S. used white phosphorus bombs in Iraq, says Israel is using the same tactic in Lebanon. He said-

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55% of all the casualties in Beirut, according to Mr. Masri, were children 15 years or younger.

He then said another startling statistic, that 30% of all the casualties are dying. And this was an extremely high casualty rate, far higher than anything they saw during the Lebanese Civil War, meaning that of every one hit, 30% of the people are dying outright. And I asked him why, and he said that it's because the Israelis are using these bombs that can penetrate through bomb shelters, that there’s been so many refugees seeking shelter in basements or in bomb shelters, and the Israelis are bombing the bomb shelters. Warplanes are bombing the bomb shelters where refugees are hiding. And also there was such a disproportionate number of children being killed and wounded, because children, he said, were the least able to really escape when the bombings began.

He interviewed a 76 year old man who said-

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... it was actually confirmed by the Ministry of the Interior in Lebanon that the minister himself did confirm that the Israelis have dropped white phosphorus in Southern Lebanon, and interestingly, just before I had gone to this hospital, I was at a refugee camp in a city park in downtown Beirut, and I interviewed an old man, a 76-year-old baker, who had told me that they fled Nabatiya down in Southern Lebanon, which is the city where it is suspected that this white phosphorus has been used and where it was confirmed by the Minister of the Interior, and this old man told me that they left because when the bombings there began -- this was within the first few days of the attack, within the first week, that is, I’m sorry -- that he left because his family was so afraid, because nearby where they lived, homes were being bombed, and inside the buildings and outside the buildings, they were glowing, as he described it. He said, “There were fires, that -- of course, we know what regular fire looks like, but this was not that -- that the buildings were glowing.

Also, we have discussed the use of experimental weapons by the US before. In November, a documentary from Italy’s RAI Television accusing the United States of illegally using white phosphorus during its attack on Fallujah. A new documentary says the United States is now using experimental laser weapons against Iraqi civilians."Star Wars in Iraq"-documents US use of experimental weapons in Iraq, produced by Maurizio Torrealta and Sigfrido Rannuci for Italy's RAI TV

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Narrator: Al Ghezali reported that he had seen three passengers in a car, all dead, with their faces and teeth burnt, the body intact, and no sign of projectiles.

MAJID AL GHEZALI: There wasn’t any bullet. I saw the teeth, just the teeth and no eyes, all of them. With the body, nothing for the bodies. Just the teeth, and all the -- I mean, the heads were burnt.

The terrain where the battle took place was dug up by the American military and replaced with other fresh earth. The bodies that were not hit by projectiles had shrunk to just slightly more than one meter in height.

MAJID AL GHEZALI: Except the bodies killed by the bullets, most of them became very small. I mean, it’s like that. Something like that. One year later, we heard that this is updated technology they used, a unique one. It’s like lasers.

SAAD AL FALLUJI: Twenty-six in the bus. About twenty of them, some of them have no head. They had been cut. Some of them, the arms, the legs. The only one who didn’t injure was the driver, and really I don’t know how he reached our hospital, because one hand, one arm was in his lap, one head beside him. It was a very, very strange, horrible thing. In the roof of the car there was parts of the bodies: omentum, intestines, brains, all parts of the body. It was miserable. Very, very, very, very miserable.

Doctor al Falluji said me that from the survivors that he operated, that they said they did not hear any noise. So there was no explosion to hear, no metal fragments or shrapnels or bullets in the bodies, so they themselves were thinking of some strange kinds of weapon, which they did not know.

It is a sci-fi nightmare become reality and our highest officials can't wait to use it in some twisted form of experiment- Like Hitler testing his military in Spain before WW2.

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We tried to learn more about it by asking for interviews to members of companies manufacturing laser and microwave weapons, yet the U.S. Defense Department prevented any information from being released to us. They also did not answer, up to the time the film was edited, the questions we had sent them in order to know whether or not experimental weapons had been tested in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We tracked down the Pentagon press conferences from before the beginning of the second Gulf war to see if they spoke about any new weapons being tested. The words of the Secretary of Defense and General Myers indicate a willingness to try weapons that had never been used before. And the questions from the press about direct energy and microwave weapons made them visibly uncomfortable.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Goodness, it is in -- for the most part, the kinds of things you're talking about are in varying early stages. Do you want to -- do you have anything you would add?

GEN. RICHARD MYERS: I don't think I would add much. I think they are in early stages and probably not ready for employment at this point.

DONALD RUMSFELD: In the normal order of things, when you invest in research and development and begin a developmental project, you don't have any intention or expectations that one would use it. On the other hand, the real world intervenes from time to time, and you reach in there and take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might use it. So the -- your question's not answerable. It is -- it depends on what happens in the future and how well things move along the track and whether or not someone feels it's appropriate to reach into a development stage and see if something might be useful, as was the case with the unmanned aerial vehicles.

JOURNALIST: But you sound like you're willing to experiment with it.

GEN. RICHARD MYERS: Yeah, I think that's the point. And I think -- and it's -- we have, I think, from the beginning of this conflict -- I think General Franks has been very open to looking at new things, if there are new things available, and has been willing to put them into the fight, even before they've been fully wrung out. And I think that's -- not referring to these particular cases of directed energy or high-powered microwave, but sure. And we will continue to do that.

COL. JOHN B. ALEXANDER: The research and certainly the concepts for direct-energy weapons go back many decades. What is happening is that the technology has now advanced sufficiently that we’re starting to see the weapons come into fruition. In other words, they’re becoming real.

There are several types of directed-energy weapons, and basically what they do is they’re known as “speed of light,” because they shoot electrons very fast over very long distances. Lasers, of course, are in the light range. Then there’s microwave weapons that are operating at other frequencies, but basically they’re beam weapons, in which nothing physical goes out. The electrons move, but the kinetic weapons we talk about, you’re shooting big bullets to go out and physically hit and destroy something. These work because the energy is deposed on the target and causes some effect.

Narrator: The target is not hit by a projectile, but rather by an impulse of energy that manages to bore through the armor of a tank.

Apart from acoustic weapons, so far the only sign of the use of energy weapons in a war scenario is a laser device known as Zeus. According to official Pentagon sources, military vehicles equipped with this laser device have been used in Afghanistan to explode mines or IEDs. According to two reliable military information sites, Defense Tech and Defense Daily, at least three such vehicles are being used in Iraq, as well, and some people report having seen them.

WILLIAM ARKIN: So, right now you have about $50 million a year being spent on non-lethal weapons. You have about another $200 million or so being spent on high power microwaves, active denial-type systems. You’ve got probably another $100 to 200 million being spent on secret black laser programs. And then you’ve got the big lasers, the high energy laser of the Air Force and the other tactical lasers. So probably, when you add all of that up, you know, the United States is probably spending a half of a billion dollars a year right now on directed-energy weapons, you know, probably somewhere in the order of 300-400 million euros. So this is a significant amount of money. This is the size of the defense budgets of some countries in Europe.

No wonder America wants to test their new toys. And what better targets than human guinea pigs to see their effect and advertise their new weaponry. Star wars tecghnology is seeing the battlefield now and so warfare is graduating into the new era of murder without conscience. Wait until more foreign powers start unveiling their latest machinery of death and joining in the fun.

When will the people wise up and refuse to get involved in this accelerated arms race of lethal destruction perpetrated upon them? When will we wise up to the psychotic leaders of the world and refuse to die for their causes? We have created a condition where our revenge motivation will be answered by a reflexive revenge response by our present day victims. Someday these weapons may reign down upon Israel and wipe out their children as well. It is a question of time before their enemies will have these weapons as well and their childrens children will neve forget what we did. You can't prevent them from getting these weapons someday. This is the consequence of what we are doing today that awaits us. We really have no vision of the future outside of what we want now as a solution. It doesn't seem to matter how we get there, to say, mideast peace, by the use of war and force to implement our control over them- to bring our style of life on them, our culture and capitocracy.

We can't give a little first and help them, we have to bomb the world to pieces to bomb it into peace.

Excerpts from Democracy Now

_________________Completely sane world
madness the only freedom

An ability to see both sides of a question
one of the marks of a mature mind

This is my first post here, I just found this forum. Anyway I am compelled to relate certain experiences regarding the things you discuss about "new" weapons being used. Specifically in certain cases they're anything but and were simply accepted as particularly bad parts of warfare before.

White phosphorus is nothing new, honestly fewer of the new shells are using white phosphorus than twenty years ago because of manufacturing hazards, far more use red phosphorus but they're basically the same anyway. White phosphorus has been around for about a hundred years give or take. I can't tell you exactly when but it was being used by WW1. Officially it has always been either for "marking" "screening" "anti-material". And always in practice its been used against people.

You see phosphorus has a few particularly horrifying traits. For one it burns just about anything the stuff burns hot well over three thousand degrees. Two white and red phosphorus aren't really extinguished by water though the worst effects will be muted, I know there's at least one other type of phosphorus that flares up and burns more if you put water on it though for the life of my can't remember what it was called. Second, when it ignites it goes into a liquid state and will flow a bit combined with a bursting charge to spread it this will get around a lot of barriers. Three it burns right through things and keeps on burning, especially organic things. When a bit of white phosphorus hits a person it sticks, and keeps burning. It burns a hole right down into the body and keeps burning until a special agent is put on it to neutralize it or it burns right through you and out the other side.

Note I'm not saying it's morally right to use it on people, the stuff is horrible I still shudder when I remember what it does to people. But it has ALWAYS been used since the first world war so we can't simply thrust blame about and abandon it. We have to realistically accept the uses WE have put it to for a century and decide based on it past and present utility whether the effects are worth the loss of a useful weapon. Personally I'm not sure how I'd decide, because I know what I would've thought back then if I'd hit a situation where it was useful and was told I couldn't use it. But at the same time the stuff, well it's bad in ways I can't properly explain unless you've seen it used on a buddy. For just a pale imitation watch that movie "We Were Soldiers" and then imagine what is was like to actually be one of them.

Second is the use of various directed energy weapons. Official versions are beginning to proliferate now so they're becoming more high profile. But certain things that were effectively energy weapons have been in the inventory for some time just with different labels and there have been quite a few spatch-cocked field expedients that were pretty nasty too.

First lasers. Yes now laser weapons are JUST beginning to start hit the field because certain technologies have improved. What isn't spoken of is that other laser devices while not designed or intended for it have been used for basically the same thing. Laser rangefinders of all sorts are dangerous though they're pushing for eye-safe ones. Especially the bigger ones, the rangefinder on an Abrams can temporarily blind a man out to at least a mile. Close up it can burn exposed skin though that's not very efficient.

The new stuff is just plain SCARY from what I've heard about it though that isn't much. But even a while back there were certain "experimental" uses for civilian industrial cutting lasers that had been remounted. Their newer equivalent is called ZUES and is a laser mounted on an armored hummer(officially it's for EOD but I've heard its already been used on people with nasty effect). At one hundred yards it'll burn through an inch of homogenous rolled steel in just under a second. Based on the experiments that've gone public in solid state lasers already there may very well be systems capable of three to five times the power of ZUES in testing. You can bet with fair safety any such testing will involve some in-theatre time in Iraq.

Second are microwave weapons. These are if anything even more frightening anti-personel devices than lasers. Lasers have certain limitations, especially attenuation and disperson by rain, water vapor, sand, etc. High-Powered microwaves have a longer wavelength and will propagate right through these, they'll also go right through quite a few materials and the body absorbs them very well. The "non-lethal" version touted as a crowd control device by the Pentagon and soon to enter service has some problems with being too damaging even at low power. Crank it up a bit, and I'm certain there's a way to boost the power over it's base setting because troops will figure out how to do it even if it's not already set up for that, and you have a weapon that will pass through most forms of concealment and literally cook people in their own bodily fluids. Just like sticking a hot dog in the microwave. They also play havoc with many types of electronics.

Now official microwave devices are new, but it's well known that with some work you can turn the magneto from a regular microwave oven into the basis of an inefficient but somewhat useful microwave gun. Only useful if you have power, but if you're in Armor and can hook up an small inverter to your vehicle batteries that's not so bad. From personal experience with just such a spatch-cocked field version they can be interesting but as dangerous to the person using them as the person they're aimed at.

First thing you'll notice is they disrupt a lot of solid-state electronics. Point it at a civilian car going down the road and it's electrical system will temporarily short out while it's in the beam. The electronics in military vehicles is hardened but even then you can get the same result at short range sometimes. Second it burns people and the first thing it burns are your eyes. Even a short burst from it can give a person retina burns and the eyes are particularly suceptible to it. Metal in the beam heats up rapidly and to burning hot temperatures. You'll get nasty burns wherever there's metal in prolonged contact with you, if you have fillings its quite bad. Third it will penetrate concealment of many kinds. It'll go right through brick or stick-built walls to a thickness of at least six inches. Also it could set off fuzes. There were other peculiar things it did but it's been long enough my memory is fuzzy. But several of us though it would be a kick-ass anti-crowd device for a tank. Deployed in a belt over the skirts and on the front and back it could keep a mob from overrunning a tank because it had a wide area of effect.

Acoustic weapons I haven't heard much about but I wouldn't doubt they're in development.

Now for the disclaimer. So far I've just described the sort of effects they have at least partially. As for they're use, like old Pete I find I'm heavily divided about this with myself. Looking at the things that could be possible with these weapons, if they'd been around in an effective form back then I would've wanted them. Just like I wanted anything else I could get my hands on that might have been an advantage. And yet the effects of directed energy weapons are frankly Scary as Hell. There's no muzzle flash, no tracer or report, you mostly can't see their effects. People just start dieing without any warning or visible source and the way of it can be pretty bad based on what I can tell from what's been declassified about how the weapons work and what I've heard about them unofficially at second hand. They're temptingly powerful, but they're different and it's unsettling. The thought of using them on civilians turns my stomach but so does the thought of pointless massacre of civilians with any weapon.

_________________I am disillusioned enough to believe nothing will get any better yet compelled to make the attempt regardless

Thanks, I'm glad I could be of use. Nice to find a reasonable forum with intelligent people.

Far as transporters and forcefields go they're more handwavery and magic-as-science than reality. Not COMPLETELY impossible mind you but not in the form most people would expect them either.

Transporters like you see in Star Trek are basically handwavery, they could never be used on a living thing. Not that it's absolutely impossible but not in the current generation of military tech and the next is only a hypothetical as well. This stuff isn't just difficult its twisting fundamental forces of reality. If it were developed you wouldn't worry about enemy troops beaming into your rear areas. The threat would be munitions that made intervening battlefield conditions and location irrelevant, delivering the munition directly to the target without it every needed a delivery vehicle or traversing the space between where it might be detected and neutralized.

There are basically two methods of teleportation, one uses quantum entanglement and is not useful for objects so much as information. This one is already being done at a very early laboratory stage by several universities here in the States, Berkely is the most well known. They've managed to use quantum entanglement to teleport photons in the lab.

Now this might not seem like much but information is important to the modern battlefield, any modern force is dependent upon communication and in the current form those transmissions can be played with drastically reducing the effectiveness of a force suffering under these conditions. Whether listening in or just jamming tampering with enemy communications is devestating and we've used it heavily for a while but especially since Gulf War 1. A communication using quantum entanglement to transmit data is impossible to intercept or jam it goes directly from the transmitter to the receiver regardless of distance or location and can't be effected by outside forces in the process. Unjammable, untraceable communication that leaves no signature to tell you a signal has been sent.

The second is quantum redaction, essentially using trickery I don't fully understand to change the probable location of an object until it simply goes somewhere else. This is far more problematic, it's been more theoretical than anything else, except that earlier this year I saw it in a report noting that Sandia had managed to teleport a single neutron using quantum redaction over a distance of a few feet inside their lab. Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate the document since, it was released by the DOE but every link and reference to it on their site is simply gone. This is the method that could possibly enable munitions to be delivered instantly anywhere desired if the location was known regardless of intervening conditions. However from what little I actually understand of the theory behind it there should also be ways of preventing objects from being teleported into an area.

Forcefields as seen on Star Trek and Star Wars are even more handwaving and magical-science than trasporters. Not to say that fields of energy are completely useless but they wouldn't perform the same way as seen in those pictures. It's less like a barrier and more like a distortion. Optical weapons such as lasers could probably ignore them. Most physical weapons would ignore them. They'd be most useful against RF based weapons like microwaves by distorting their signal into ineffectiveness combined with a disappating Faraday Cage. Charged particle based weapons would have their path bent out of the way, effectiveness would depend upon the relative power of the field and weapon passing through it.

These systems would be large too, at least initially and always power hungry. I can see any such thing developed being deployed first as an add-on to Armor units. Tanks and IFVs are RPG magnets, now our tanks and AFVs are damned hard to kill among the best armoured in the world. But it's not impossible just difficult. Such a forcefield would be a godsend to any armored vehicle because the current induced in a fused munition passing through the field would prematurely detonate it. Shaped charge weapons rely on detonating at the proper distance and attitude to focus the stream of molten metal and burning gases on their target. By prematurely detonating them as they entered the field they be rendered useless against even light armor. Once again the only thing that could kill an AFV would be a purely kinetic penetrator (and those are too heavy for individual infantry use) or a heavy bomb or missile with so large a warhead it could ignore the premature detonation and kill with blast effect and that would be a big one, have to be delivered by aircraft. Also the crawling ground charge induced by the field would do the same thing to IEDs before the vehicle reached them, setting them off early with the vehicle likely too far away from the blast to sustain unsurvivable damage.

_________________I am disillusioned enough to believe nothing will get any better yet compelled to make the attempt regardless